When reelecting Trump, America acknowledged that our country will collapse with the oil industry.
If you look where Trump (really, any Republicans) win big, it’s inevitably an area with a big O&G footprint.
Of late, that’s shifted slightly to Tech Data Centers. But the nature of lucrative extractionary industry is that it gives you a ton of money to pay one half of the working class to restrain and abuse the other half.
It is the Iron Law of Institutions in macro scale. The oil industry and American car companies would rather see America suffer and lose its position in the world, than to help facilitate a transition to some other energy source that would threaten their own entrenched power.
My dad worked for Exxon. He used to joke that they had a big switch in the back of the HQ that read “Green Energy”. And as soon as fossil fuels stopped being profitable, they’d flip it and become a solar/wind giant overnight.
He died back in the 90s, so he never got to see the big milestones. But if you ever look up T. Boone Pickens, this oil billionaire was saying very much the same thing in the late '00s. Natural gas is temporary. Wind is where the real infinite money machine lives.
And now my own state of Texas leads the county in wind production and runs a tight second to California on solar.
So much of this is absolutely already happening. And it’s being financed by the same folks who said it was impossible twenty years ago.
If you look where Trump (really, any Republicans) win big, it’s inevitably an area with a big O&G footprint.
Of late, that’s shifted slightly to Tech Data Centers. But the nature of lucrative extractionary industry is that it gives you a ton of money to pay one half of the working class to restrain and abuse the other half.
My dad worked for Exxon. He used to joke that they had a big switch in the back of the HQ that read “Green Energy”. And as soon as fossil fuels stopped being profitable, they’d flip it and become a solar/wind giant overnight.
He died back in the 90s, so he never got to see the big milestones. But if you ever look up T. Boone Pickens, this oil billionaire was saying very much the same thing in the late '00s. Natural gas is temporary. Wind is where the real infinite money machine lives.
And now my own state of Texas leads the county in wind production and runs a tight second to California on solar.
So much of this is absolutely already happening. And it’s being financed by the same folks who said it was impossible twenty years ago.